The Jetsons supermarket

By Garry BarkerOctober 1 2002

Vale the checkout chick. In the supermarkets of the future, groceries will check out themselves. All the customer will need is the strength to push a trolley, and a credit card with the strength to survive the swiping.

In the future every one of the 20,000 to 30,000 items stocked will carry a pinhead-sized microchip - about one-quarter of a square millimetre - in its label.

Radio frequency identification tags, as these microchips are called, are already used in the United States and Europe, mainly in warehouses and factories, although some American car-fleet owners pay for their fuel using tags provided by oil companies. The E-Toll used on the Harbour Bridge is a form of such a tag.

Calvin Anderson, chief executive in Australia for Symbol Technologies, says the arrival of the technology is inevitable.

"The whole experience in the supermarket must change," he says. "Today, it's a burden - not a good scene. There's noise, clutter and delays at the checkouts. Customers look at the queues and see a morning or an afternoon lost. So, let's re-invent what we do today and make it customer-driven, rather than just faster." ");document.write("

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The tag's chips need no batteries or other electrical connection. They are activated by the energy of a short-range radio beam transmitted by the checkout scanner.

Customers will simply load items into a trolley and push it to a scanning point where the radio beam will identify and record every package in a millisecond.

Swipe a card through a reader, tear off the receipt and push on through the gate to the car park or a restorative cup of coffee. If the store is crowded, staff could "queue bust" using hand-held wireless scanners.

That is only one aspect of a wireless-borne revolution that is coming to every aspect of shopping, from the factory to the warehouse, the delivery truck, the shop and its accounting system, and even the customers' homes.

The chips will revolutionise production in factories and on farms, will allow tighter deliveries, less wastage and more efficient customer service.

"The whole supply chain question ultimately comes back not to how efficiently I run my warehouse, but do I need a warehouse at all," Mr Anderson said. "If I am a retailer I want access to information along the whole chain. I don't want to store stuff, I want it delivered as I need it."

It was for reasons such as these that Cisco paid more than $500 million to David Skellern and Neil Weste, of Radiata, a Macquarie University-based IT research establishment, for their in-building wireless technology.

Years of work and billions of dollars in investment lie ahead before the last barcode has been pensioned off and the tags have taken over. "Retailing is a $120 billion industry in Australia," Mr Anderson said. "Margins are tight, but if you can save even .1 per cent, that's a big number."